Printing Selected Pages of Emails in Outlook 2010

One of the more frustrating issues for Outlook users over the years has been the inability to effectively select specific pages of an email message to print. Outlook 2010 finally addresses this deficiency; we discussed the problem in Outlook 2007 in “Printing Only the First Page of an Outlook 2007 Email,” InstantDoc ID 100555.

With Outlook 2010 you can now select individual pages or a series of pages to print where a single email spans multiple pages. With Outlook 2007 and earlier, you weren’t able to natively restrict printing. You had to depend on external options such as opening the email in a browser or printing to a PDF first and then identifying which pages to print. The Print options in Outlook 2010 replace the need to use additional applications.

To print an email in Outlook 2010, be sure the email is open and then click File, Print (or hit CTRL-P). In the Print dialog box, which will look like the one shown in Figure 1, there’s a built-in print preview for your email by page. In Figure 1, I selected a message with 22 pages, which can be viewed one at a time within the window. Users might choose to print the first page only or a section of pages in a long email. To limit printing to a specific page or set of pages click the Print Options button in the Print dialog box. This opens a window like the one shown in Figure 2. In this sample, the red arrow points to the option you can use to select a Page Range for the pages you want to print. Here you can enter individual pages, sets of pages, or both. In Figure 2, I entered 5-7 to print pages 5, 6, and 7. You can also enter individual pages or a combination, such as 2, 5, 7-9, 12.

Users no longer have to print all the pages of a multi-page email simply to retrieve a single page. You no longer have to use an intermediary application, such as a PDF viewer or web browser, to limit the number of pages in an email to be printed. Outlook 2010 now performs this functionality very well.